We Are F%$#ed

Have you heard about the Thwaites, aka the "Doomsday Glacier"?

It just got a lot lot more doomey.

We are seeing more sea water under the glacier, eroding its base, and sea level rise estimates from its collapse have doubled.

One of Earth’s most dangerous glaciers is emerging as a potentially greater driver of future sea-level rise than previously understood.

A team of glaciologists at the University of California and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed a new ice sheet model to come up with a more accurate projection of the melting of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. The findings, published in Nature Communications, estimate that the glacier could contribute up to 1.2 inches (30 millimeters) of sea level rise by 2100, even without additional climate warming.

The study highlights an even greater risk of coastal flooding in the coming decades than previously estimated.

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Also known as the Doomsday Glacier, Thwaites has undergone a profound transformation in recent decades, thinning, accelerating, and retreating inland as warm ocean water eats away at its floating ice shelves from below.

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The researchers behind the new study set out to reconcile ice sheet models against observations collected over the past 20 years.

Using synthetic aperture radar data from Finland’s ICEYE satellite constellation, researchers detected fluctuations in Thwaites Glacier’s grounding zone along its main trunk. The observations suggest that seawater penetrates several miles beneath the glacier’s grounded ice, lifting it in response to tidal fluctuations.

This movement allows pressurized seawater to travel beneath the ice, potentially carrying ocean heat farther inland and intensifying melting at the glacier’s base. The intrusion of seawater may also be influenced by ocean currents reshaped by climate change.

Clearly, global warming is a fraud. 

We're Boned

There has been a marked increase in instability in the ice in Antarctica, particularly in the western part of the frozen continent.

There have people who have pointed to the east, and noted that at least it's stable there.

Not so much any more:

For the first time since satellites began observing Antarctica nearly half a century ago, an ice shelf has collapsed on the eastern part of the continent, scientists said.

The collapse of the 450-square-mile Conger ice shelf in a part of the continent called Wilkes Land occurred in mid-March. It was first spotted by scientists with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and appeared in satellite images taken on March 17, according to the National Ice Center in the United States.

Ice shelves are floating tongues of ice at the end of glaciers that in Antarctica serve as outlets for the continent’s massive ice sheets. Stresses cause cracks in the floating ice, and meltwater and other factors can cause the fissures to erode and grow to a point where the shelf disintegrates rapidly.

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The loss of a shelf can allow faster movement of the glaciers behind it, which can lead to more rapid ice-sheet loss and thus greater sea-level rise. Ice-shelf loss is a major concern in West Antarctica, where warming related to climate change is having a greater effect than in the east.

Several very large glaciers in West Antarctica are already flowing faster and if their ice shelves were to collapse completely, sea levels could rise on the order of 10 feet over centuries.

Given that we are now seeing temperatures that are 70°F (39°C) above normal, I think that we are looking at a 10 foot sea rise in decades, not centuries.

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While some ice shelves have collapsed in West Antarctica — notably the much larger Larsen B, in 2002 — the Conger collapse is the first observed in East Antarctica since the era of satellite imagery began in 1979, said Catherine Walker, a glaciologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

I need to buy some beach front property in Denver.

The Adventures of Boaty McBoatface

Remember how an internet meme hijacked a naming poll for the new research ship for the Natural Environment Research Council?

Eventually, the ship was named the David Attenborough, but one of its unmanned underwater vehicles was named Boaty McBoatface.

Well, now the colorfully named UUV has made a significant find:

Remember Boaty McBoatface? In the years since the naming snafu over a research vessel grabbed international headlines, Boaty has been off gathering crucial deep-sea data on the effects of climate change.

Now, the findings from Boaty's first mission are out — and they shed light on how Antarctic winds that are strengthening due to climate change are impacting sea levels.

But before we dive into what Boaty found, let's remember how it got here.

Back in 2016, Britain's Natural Environment Research Council asked the public for help naming a new cutting-edge polar research ship. Shackleton, Endeavor and Falcon were among the contenders put forth, as NPR reported at the time. But the Internet had another idea. Voters in the online poll overwhelmingly threw their support behind "Boaty McBoatface."

The U.K.'s science minister at the time, Jo Johnson, vetoed the people's choice, saying the vessel needed a name that was more "suitable." The ship was ultimately named Sir David Attenborough, after the well-known natural historian.

But the council did pay homage to the Internet's extraordinary naming powers by naming a smaller, more modest vessel Boaty McBoatface. And the autonomous yellow submarine has had a very successful maiden voyage.

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"In recent decades, winds blowing over the Southern Ocean have been getting stronger due to the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica and increasing greenhouse gases," the researchers said in a statement.

They wanted to see how these stronger winds on the surface were impacting the environment far below the waves — and whether that deep ocean activity was contributing to rising sea levels.

So they sent Boaty into underwater valleys, traveling to depths of up to 4,000 meters (nearly 2.5 miles). Boaty's longest journey took three days and traveled 180 km, or more than 110 miles.

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Boaty was able to pinpoint a previously unknown way in which this mixing is causing water to warm up across large areas, she said. Usually, deeper, colder water mixes with shallower, warmer water — think of vast amounts of water moving up and down.

Well done Boaty.

Clearly, Global Warming is a Myth

This is anthropogenic climate change, or a giant wants the 2^nd largest martini ever.

an ice berg the size of Delaware has detached from the Larson-C ice sheet:

A hunk of ice the size of Delaware broke off from the Antarctic Peninsula.

Sometime in the last few days, scientists say an iceberg weighing roughly a trillion metric tons separated from the Larsen C Ice Shelf and began its long, slow drift northward through the Weddell Sea.

The 2,400 square-mile mass of ice won’t immediately raise sea levels, but its loss has probably altered the profile of the continent’s western peninsula for decades to come, scientists say.

The Larsen Ice Shelf consists of a series of many floating ice chunks. It is named for Norwegian explorer Capt. Carl Anton Larsen, who discovered it in 1893.

By the time it was first photographed in the 1960s, the fateful crack was already visible, according to NASA.

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The release of this iceberg has reduced Larsen C, the largest ice shelf in the Larsen formation and the fourth-largest on the continent, by more than 12%. Scientists says the remaining ice shelf could now be less stable, which could pave the way for a more severe event: disintegration.

“This ice shelf is on the trajectory to collapse in the coming decades,” said Eric Rignot, a UC Irvine glaciologist and research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

While this has no direct impact on sea level, the ice was already floating in the water, it does have the effect of clearing the path for increased ice flows from land based glaciers, like removing a cork from a bottle, which could raise sea levels.

Also, the weight of ice over the land in Antarctica and Greenland has actually pushed the land down, so not only will the water melt eventually cause sea level rise, but more land will erupt which will further raise sea levels.

This is something that we need to address sooner rather than later.

We are F%$#ed

The massive Larsen C ice shelf is predicted to collapse by 2010 2020:

It has been a really bad week for the ice shelves of the quickly warming Antarctic peninsula, the part of the vast frozen continent that extends northward toward South America.

Earlier this week, we learned that the gigantic marine-based Larsen C ice shelf, which is almost as big as Scotland, has several worrisome vulnerabilities — including a growing rift across it. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and several other research centers say this could pose an “imminent risk” to its stability.

And now, NASA scientists are giving an even worse verdict for the remnants of the nearby Larsen B ice shelf, much of which already disintegrated back in 2002. Back then, the shelf lost a region larger than Rhode Island, but there are still 618 square miles left of it — for now.

However, in a new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine say that this remnant now faces its “approaching demise.” In a news release, NASA adds that the ice shelf “is likely to disintegrate completely before the end of the decade.”

If these two research teams are right, then the coming years could see major ice calving events off of the Antarctic peninsula — especially for Larsen B.

“What might happen is that for a few years, we will have the detachment of big icebergs from this remaining ice shelf, and then at one point, one very very warm summer, when you have lots of melting of the surface, the whole thing will just give way, and will shatter into thousands of smaller icebergs,” says the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Ala Khazendar, lead author of the new study.

Clearly, anthropogenic climate change is a myth.

Note that this is an ice shelf,  and as such, is already supported by the ocean so the impact on ocean levels is effectively nil, but this will change the environment and albedo (reflectively) which will likely increase the flow of glaciers into the ocean.

Prediction made by climate experts have consistently been exceeded by what is really going on.

Not good.